Chrystal dé louise is an Australian photographic artist residing in the northern rivers, NSW on Bundjalung Country.

Chrystal’s practice explores the relationship between mother and child, the mother, mothering and motherhood as relevant, reverent and sacrificial. The deeply transformative reality of matresence, simultaneously speaking to the reproductive labour, its encroachment in domesticity, essential daily rituals, patriarchal and societal constructs that are at a visceral contradiction to the lived experience, a documentary approach to the deep work that is child rearing.

Chrystal works in both analogue and digital photography, capturing her own inner landscape her practice interweaves art, including textiles, sociology, psychology and many other dimensions of knowledge interweaving matricentric feminist theory, social contradictions and conventions, progress and its regression, including text in her photographic practice.

This ongoing series of work explores the relationship between mother and child, the mother figure and how its been hijacked, the fragility of life and our disconnection to it, the patriarchal institution of motherhood, maternal age, culture and sexuality, the sexualisation of the feminine and how this work is an agent of change, a commitment to the visual literacy of maternal experience, a new way to define and revere the mother and child.

Motherhood is and of itself a universal poetry waiting to be represented a timelessness redefined a re-examination of what we may think is familiar.

Awards.

Semi finalist 2024. Portraiture. HEAD ON.

2024 Small art works Brunswick Street Gallery.

shortlisted. 2023. Experimental. Photocollective.

Semi finalist. 2023. Portraiture. Head on.

Exhibitor. 2023. Portraiture. Head on.

shortlist. 2022. Portraiture. Photocollective.

shortlisted. 2023. Experimental. Photocollective.

Find me

photo vogue. Chrystal de louise

@chrystal.delouise